More Money For SaaS For Your SaaS So That You Can Buy More SaaS

Morning Report: Investors are putting more money into SaaS for SaaS. Sign of the times!

Despite my natural inclination to be snarky and rude about things that sound silly, this probably isn’t, so I’ll behave.

Today, BetterCloud announced a $60 million Series E round of funding, bringing its total raised capital to just under $107 million. Bain Capital led the newest round with prior lead investors Accel and Flybridge taking part, among other capital pools.

BetterCloud is a SaaS tool designed to help companies better manage their SaaS tools. So, it’s a meta-SaaS tool that plugs into a number of modern software applications, allowing corporate IT to “automatically enforce policies” and “uncover blind spots” and so forth, to quote its own material.

The reason why this is probably a pretty important concept is that SaaS is now a huge category of spend for a host of companies, thus demanding better management tools. So big is the need, in fact, that BetterCloud is hardly alone in its work.

Zylo (a Bessemer-backed shop) has raised just under $13 million for its “SaaS optimization platform.” I want to claim that it’s a SaaS-powered SaaS optimization software company, but the company has managed to perfectly hide its pricing details. So for all we know you can actually only pay for Zylo with Monero you mined yourself on your friend’s browser through a now-banned Chrome extension.

Regardless, I suspect you pay for Zylo on a recurring basis, making it another SaaS shop working on SaaS. And I’d bet there are more. Email in if you know of any more, as it’s a simply fascinating category.

And, it lets us write fun things like “venture capitalists are giving more money to SaaS companies that help other SaaS companies better manage their SaaS spend, largely spending dollars along the way that they raised from the original set of venture capitalists and the friends of those venture capitalists.” It’s SaaS all the way down!

From The Crunchbase Daily:

Fewer ICOs launched in Q1

• The first quarter of 2018 brought big losses to the cryptocurrency market. Could initial coin offerings be next? Quarter-over-quarter, ICO deal counts decreased by a touch over 20 percent, even as total capital raised rose due to Telegram’s record-setting offering.

Southeast Asian startups in spotlight as Grab ascends

• Grab, the Southeast Asian ride-hailing leader, has been in the spotlight a lot lately, most recently for a potential investment from Alibaba. But it’s not the only startup in the region gaining traction. A Crunchbase analysis finds that seed and early-stage funding in Southeast Asia grew by over 300 percent in the past decade, yielding a long list of startups to watch.

Reflexion raises over $100M for cancer radiotherapy

• RefleXion Medical, developer of a radiotherapy system for cancer treatment, said it has raised more than $100 million in a Series C round led by The Rise Fund and joined by new and existing inveestors.

UpCounsel raises $12M Series B

• UpCounsel, a marketplace for legal services, has raised a $12 million Series B round, according to a securities filing.This latest round brings total funding for the San Francisco-based startup to $26 million.

Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias